Käthe Kollwitz Quotes

25 Sourced Quotes

I am gradually approaching the period in my life when work comes first. When both the boys went away for Easter, I hardly did anything but work. Worked, slept, ate and went for short walks. But above all I worked. And yet I wonder whether the "blessing" is not missing from such work. No longer diverted by other emotions, I work the way a cow grazes.

Käthe Kollwitz
There must be understanding between the artist and the people. In the best ages of art that has always been the case. Genius can probably run on ahead and seek out new ways. But the good artists who follow after genius — and I count myself among these — have to restore the lost connection once more.

Käthe Kollwitz
I do not want to die... until I have faithfully made the most of my talent and cultivated the seed that was placed in me until the last small twig has grown.

Käthe Kollwitz
Genius can probably run on ahead and seek out new ways. But the good artists who follow after genius — and I count myself among these — have to restore the lost connection once more. A pure studio art is unfruitful and frail, for anything that does not form living roots — why should it exist at all?

Käthe Kollwitz
I felt that I have no right to withdraw from the responsibility of being an advocate. It is my duty to voice the sufferings of people, the sufferings that never end and are as big as mountains.

Käthe Kollwitz
If all the people who have been hurt by the war were to exclude joy from their lives, it would almost be as if they had died.

Käthe Kollwitz
For me the Koenigsberg longshoremen had beauty; the Polish jimkes on their grain ships had beauty; the broad freedom of movement in the gestures of the common people had beauty. Middle-class people held no appeal for me at all. Bourgeois life on the whole seemed to me pedantic.

Käthe Kollwitz
I am afraid of dying — but being dead, oh yes, that to me is often an appealing prospect.

Käthe Kollwitz
I have never done any work cold…I have always worked with my blood, so to speak.

Käthe Kollwitz
For the last third of life there remains only work. It alone is always stimulating, rejuvenating, exciting and satisfying.

Käthe Kollwitz
For work, one must be hard and thrust outside of oneself what one has lived through.

Käthe Kollwitz
Recently I began reading my old diaries. Back to before the war. Gradually I became very depressed. The reason for that is probably that I wrote only when there were obstacles and halts to the flow of life, seldom when everything was smooth and even.... As I read I distinctly felt what a half-truth a diary presents.

Käthe Kollwitz
The working-class woman shows me much more than the ladies who are totally limited by conventional behavior. The working-class woman shows me her hands, her feet, and her hair. She lets me see the shape and form of her body through her clothes. She presents herself and the expression of her feelings openly, without disguises.

Käthe Kollwitz
I have received a commission to make a poster against war. That is a task that makes me happy. Some may say a thousand times that this is not pure art.... but as long as I can work, I want to be effective with my art.

Käthe Kollwitz
Every war already carries within it the war that will answer it. Every war is answered by a new war, until everything is smashed. That is why I am so wholeheartedly for a radical end to this madness and why my only hope is in world socialism.

Käthe Kollwitz
I have been through a revolution, and I am convinced that I am no revolutionist. My childhood dreams of dying on the barricades will hardly be fulfilled, because I should hardly mount a barricade now that I know what they were like in reality. And so I know now what an illusion I lived in for so many years. I thought I was a revolutionary and was only an evolutionary. Yes, sometimes I do not know whether I am a socialist at all, whether I am not rather a democrat instead. How good it is when reality tests you to the guts and pins you relentlessly to the very position you always thought, so long as you clung to your illusion, was unspeakably wrong.

Käthe Kollwitz
As you, the children of my body, have been my tasks, so too are my other works.

Käthe Kollwitz
My work is not, of course, pure art in the sense that Schmidt-Rottluff's is, but it is art nonetheless... It is all right with me that my work serves a purpose. I want to have an effect on my time, in which human beings are so confused and in need of help.

Käthe Kollwitz
Pacifism simply is not a matter of calm looking on; it is hard work.

Käthe Kollwitz
Growing old is partly an inescapable process of accommodation and adjustment.

Käthe Kollwitz
Bisexuality is almost a necessary factor in artistic production; at any rate, the tinge of masculinity within me helped me in my work.

Käthe Kollwitz
I can always paint very well with my eyes, but with my hands it doesn't always work out.

Käthe Kollwitz
Where do all the women who have watched so carefully over the lives of their beloved ones get the heroism to send them to face the cannon?

Käthe Kollwitz
The development of the national spirit in its present form leads into blind alleys. Some condition must be found which preserves the life of the nation, but rules out the fatal rivalry among nations.

Käthe Kollwitz
As in everything else, I find that age is not good for much, that one becomes deafer and less sensitive. Also, the higher up the mountain you climb, the less of a view you get. A mist closes in and cheats you of the hoped-for and expected opportunity to see far and wide...

Käthe Kollwitz